6/30/2015

SharePoint 2013 Search Weirdness – Part 4: More Duplication Weirdness

How many Announcement Lists do I have?

In the first article of this series I showed how something like a series of Purchase Orders that differ in only the PO number, date and a few other details can appear to SharePoint 2013 search as duplicates and be excluded in the default search results. I have found something stranger… it seems that sometimes all Announcement lists look the same to search and are also treated as duplicates. Lists!

As an example, I did a search to find all Announcement lists using ContentClass:STS_List_Announcements and found only 8 in my entire test farm.

I then edited the search results page and changed the duplicates setting (steps here) and then found all 23 of the Announcement lists.

I duplicated the issue in both a test farm (15.0.4649.1000 June 2014 CU) and in the today's version of Office 365. Going forward I'm recommending that the "Remove Duplicates" feature be disabled on all search result pages. Now all I need to do is write a PowerShell script to do this.

Another Test

Just in case it has something to do with the Enterprise Search Center, I tried the test using "This Site" in a site that had two announcement lists, one titled Announcements and the other titled Jokes. The search only found one list. Note that in the refiner section there are two authors listed. If I click Sam then I can see the Jokes lists while if I click Mike I can see the Announcements list. But never both! The refiner seems to know that they are both there.

_layouts/15/osssearchresults.aspx

The problem with this duplicate problem is that the "This Site" search sends me to the _layouts/15/osssearchresults.aspx page, which is not customizable with Edit Page. I have no place to turn off the "Remove Duplicates" feature!

Solution?

In the Enterprise Search Center, edit each results page to turn off the "Remove Duplicates" feature. For "This Site"… tell the users to use "Everything" instead, which redirects them to the Enterprise Search Center.

If you need to restrict the "Everything" search to a single site then use this: